Every legend starts from zero. Bruce Lee was beat up in an alleyway in China by children larger than him. Michael Jordan admits that his success his attributed to his failures. Jordan is proud of his failures:
I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot… and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why… I succeed.
I was asked in an interview once “How do you handle failure?” This surprised me. As if failure is a rare moment of challenge while success bursts at every seam of life. The reality is the opposite for anyone serious about effectively learning a skill or studying for an exam.
Khatzumoto at AJATT(Aim to Fail) was my first introduction to the wonders of failure. I came to revel in it. Failure means later success. If we are afraid of failure, we move nowhere. If the great people of the world stopped at their failures, then our human civilization would have never advanced. The guy who invented fire was unlikely some genius and nailed this fire thing on his first try. Famously Thomas Edison took 3000 attempts to invent the light bulb. Gandhi worked for 34 years to peacefully bring independence to India.
Every great accomplishment is built on the graves of countless failures. In How Children Learn, John Holt discusses a teaching experience. An eight-year-old class was playing a number guessing game. The teacher said the number was between 1 and 1000. A girl raised her hand and asked if the number was between 500 and 1000. The teacher said her guess was incorrect. The girl became frustrated and angry. However she learned the same information as if the answer was yes. The author says this shows how our education system teaches favoring correct answers and failures are just right out.
Anki is a clear win or try again. There are degrees of correctness, though it is quantifiable as a “right” or “try again.” Many traditional methods have a grey area of correctness. Flash cards with loads of information can be “well.. I got this part right…” so the remaining information may be studied less. Passively reading the material means it is impossible to fail. This is also one of the least effective methods to study, close to avoiding study altogether.
SRS is inherently the dealer of failures. The first, second, third, fourth, however many times seeing a card will likely be a failure. This is okay and means it is working. The failures are little seeds that will grow into success and strong memories. The failures are usually the first few times seeing a card. For only a few minutes a day, this is fine. The magic of SRS comes a few times after seeing the card and suddenly it is remembered with barely any effort.
Love the failures. Eat them for breakfast. Cover yourself in failures. Dive head first into the failure pool – it is the only way to learn how to swim.
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